Kansas will now just have one clinic in the state allowed to provide abortions, as the state signaled Thursday that Kansas’ only other two providers are out of business due to tough, new licensing requirements. Advocates of abortion rights allege it’s part of a coordinated, national campaign to limit a woman’s access to reproductive freedom, while abortion opponents argue Kansas’ new rules merely aim to protect the health of women or a viable fetus.
“This is radical, extreme government intrusion into private health care,” Peter Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, said Thursday as his clinic filed suit in U.S. District Court to have the new regulations thrown out. “We have been targeted in this bill and Kansas women are the ones who will suffer… This wasn’t chipping away at the edges — this was a full, frontal assault.”
Within an hour of his announcement, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment issued a sparsely worded statement that it had approved one license of the three it had reviewed, without naming names. Despite the state’s secrecy, it was clear Planned Parenthood had survived because the other two providers, a clinic named Aid for Women in Kansas City Kan., and a father-daughter private practice in nearby Overland Park, had already acknowledged their offices didn’t meet new codes. Released just two weeks ago, the regulations, among other things, dictate square footage for janitors’ closets, staff dressing rooms and patient lockers.
Those two providers, likewise, have gone to federal court seeking an injunction against the “burdensome and costly requirements that are not medically necessary or appropriate.” U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia has set a 3 p.m. hearing for Friday. “Today is our last day,” Jeff Pederson of Aid to Women, said Wednesday. “We’d have to gut the place” to be in compliance.
Before Thursday’s announcement, there was a threat Planned Parenthood would be denied a license, too, which would have made Kansas the only state in the nation where a woman could not find an abortion. Even with Planned Parenthood kept in business, the law will strain the clinic’s capabilities Brownlie said. About 8,000 women a year seek abortions in Kansas; Planned Parenthood did about 5,000 of them last year and the other two providers handled 3,000. That likely includes a large number of patients from across the state line, where Missouri already has tough restrictions in place and there are no clinics in the urban core.
“As was the intent of Gov. Brownback and the Kansas Legislature, it will be harder for a woman in Kansas to get an abortion , unless the court acts” said Brownlie. The clinic was able to comply by purchasing a “neo-natal crash unit” and other emergency supplies for a live birth, which Brownlie says never happens at Planned Parenthood, which offers abortions up to 21 weeks.
Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, said it was not the law’s intent to shut down abortion clinics and noted South Carolina has a similar law and clinics there have survived. Abortion providers are “putting on a show,” she said. “They’re the ones who said if you make abortion legal, we’ll keep women safe,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you want rooms big enough to get gurneys in and out of?”
Dr. Herbert Hodes, one of the two providers now filing suit, said abortion is just one of the services he and his daughter provide in their private ob-gyn practice. He delivers babies at nearby hospitals and does other procedures such as tubal ligations in his office. He said there’s no reason to mandate patient lockers — noting hospitals usually just put a patient’s belongings in a bag under the gurney when they go from pre-op to surgery to recovery.
“It’s a joke and a sham,” Hodes told TIME. “The only purpose is to shut down access to abortions.” He noted he complies with rules from the Kansas Board of Healing Arts and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, since “they’re realistic regulations drawn up by doctors for doctors. We all know how much legislators know about health care for women — nothing,” Hodes said.
Kansas legislators have tried to implement similar regulations before, but gained traction only with the election of the conservative Brownback. Kansas is also one of the states where lawmakers are trying to block funding for Planned Parenthood. The state has long been a hotbed for the abortion issue; the late Dr. George Tiller, who famously offered late-term abortions in Wichita, was murdered in 2009.
Pederson, of the Aid for Women, echoed Hodes’ complaints about unnecessary regulations, noting one of the new codes mandates a two-hour recovery period. He said when he accompanied his father to get his teeth pulled, his dad was sedated, yet they left 10 minutes after the procedure was complete. “The women don’t want to stay here two hours, and they don’t need to. They have a caregiver with them. They’re drunk, but they’re walking.”
The majority of Pederson’s clients are low income or minorities, he said, and he fears folks will go back to pre-Roe v. Wade days and seek home remedies or other means to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. “I can remember what it was like before.”
See “NYC to Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Stop Misleading Pregnant Women.”
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